An electrifying, thought-provoking exploration of how the digital era is reshaping our world, by bestselling, Women's Prize-winning writer Naomi Alderman From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Power What’s the most useful thing you could know about your own life? In this era-defining book, developed from her ground-breaking Radio 4 essay series, Naomi Alderman turns her boundless curiosity and incisive thinking to a question that affects us all – how do we understand, and navigate, the epoch we’re living through? She calls this epoch the Information Crisis. The internet has flooded us with more knowledge, opinions, ideas, opportunities, as well as verbal attacks and misinformation than ever before. It lets us learn more quickly and also spread falsehood more quickly, it brings us together and also divides us in new ways, it is now the lens through which we perceive and understand the world. There is no going back. But we have been here before. In fact, this is humanity's third information crisis. The first, the invention of writing 5,000 years ago and the second, the invention of the printing press, 600 years ago, drastically reshaped our perceptions, interactions and mental landscapes in ways that feel acutely familiar. Overwhelmed by information, people become afraid and angry, unsettled and distressed as well as more knowledgeable, educated and curious. By looking at those previous information crises, both the turmoil and the advances, Alderman asks what we can learn from the past to better understand, and navigate, our present and our future. Drawing on the work of philosophers and historians, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today explores how new technology opens up new ways of being and helps us chart a way forward (once again), through the turbulent seas of information overload. 'Alderman is one of our most surprising and delightful public intellectuals, and this book grapples wonderfully with our current schisms and their historical precedents' JON RONSON
Author
Naomi Alderman (born 1974 in London) is a British author and novelist. Alderman was educated at South Hampstead High School and Lincoln College, Oxford where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She then went on to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a novelist. She was the lead writer for Perplex City, an Alternate reality game, at Mind Candy from 2004 through June, 2007.[1] Her father is Geoffrey Alderman, an academic who has specialised in Anglo-Jewish history. She and her father were interviewed in The Sunday Times "Relative Values" feature on 11 February 2007.[2] Her literary debut came in 2006 with Disobedience, a well-received (if controversial) novel about a rabbi's daughter from North London who becomes a lesbian, which won her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers. Since its publication in the United Kingdom, it has been issued in the USA, Germany, Israel, Holland, Poland and France and is due to be published in Italy, Hungary and Croatia. She wrote the narrative for The Winter House, an online, interactive yet linear short story visualized by Jey Biddulph. The project was commissioned by Booktrust as part of the Story campaign, supported by Arts Council England. [3]
